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From Placebo To Panacea: Exploring The Influence Of Price, Suspicion, And Persuasion Knowledge On Consumers’ Perception Of Quality, Vahid Rahmani

Marketing Theses & Dissertations

Consumers’ associate higher prices with higher levels of quality. Nevertheless, the relationship between price and objective quality (i.e., real quality) in the marketplace is not always strong or even positive. This seemingly paradoxical phenomenon could be explained by either consumers’ lack of access to the product information (which is unlikely as we live in the age of information) or their reluctance/inability to assimilate the available information and modify their price-quality judgments. The current research is built on this latter assumption and attempts to answer two substantive questions that remain to be fully addressed in the pricing literature: First, how can …